Book 32 - Her Name is Chanel Miller

Title: Know My Name

Author: Chanel Miller

Genre: memoir

This is a hard book to read. What Miller survived - what she continues to survive - at the hands of that amphibious turd Brock Turner is horrific, disgusting, all the things that make your skin crawl...and yet she tells the story (the before, the during, and the after) with grace and unflinching truth. There are a few things that will stick with me for a long, long time:

1. 1. The reclamation of her name, her body, and herself through the writing of this book. All of these things were endeavored to be stripped away throughout the process of holding Brock accountable. "My pain was never more valuable than his potential", she writes, and this book serves to fill in the colours the creeps tried to squirrel away (no offense to squirrels).

2. 
   

3. 2. UTTER FRUSTRATION FOR A BROKEN SYSTEM. The price for holding her attacker accountable wasn't just putting her life on hold, which would be terrible enough, but actually derailing her life. The suffering Brock caused was an atomic bomb, with the effects poisoning Miller, her family, her friends, her career, her creativity...all because on a night she decided to go to a party with her sister, Brock "had decided that yes or no, moving or motionless, he wanted to fuck someone".

3. "You have to hold out to see how your life unfolds, because it is most likely beyond what you can imagine. It is not a question of if you will survive this, but what beautiful things await you when you do." Yes. This.

I will never look at these types of crimes the same way. It's so easy to slip into the carefully crafted trap laid by lawyers and media and politicians and every other source of "truth" being pummeled down the average person's throat - the trap that defines the victim only in reference to their attacker. Chanel Miller's story peels away the lies peddled by the slime of the earth (no offense to slime) and shows us: here. This story only exists because of him, but the same cannot and should not ever be said about her, or others like her.

Rating: 🍓🍓🍓🍓